“Hi…” she answered.
“Hey sorry about last night. I had some really urgent business to attend to.” He said.
“Oh yea?” she said inside her before typing “It's okay.”
“Well... I was wondering if you wouldn't mind me making it up to you. Let's have a cup of coffee together.” She thought about it for a minute and decided that there was no harm in it. After all, if this was about intimidating her or scaring her, there were like a hundred ways he could have done that without needing to invite her to coffee first.
“Sure... I’m at Amanda’s. Can you come over there?” he wasn’t responding anymore. Now what was his problem this time? Was he coming or going or was he just going to have her sit there and wait for him without showing up?
“You know what... I'll give him ten minutes. If he is not here in ten, I'm out of here!” she said to herself as she sat back and started to mentally count the minutes until he would show up.
“I’m taking a big risk here. What if this guy is just a serial killer? What am I going to do if he attacks me?” It was a question that had kept on roaming around her mind since she had heard him talk about trust and poisons like that. Now it was starting to look to her like she needed to make up her mind and make it up fast. If he really was killer, one of the last things she wanted to do was let him know that she knew about him. But how was she to remain normal if she knew that the man seated across from her was a killer?
His words from the other night came back to her. When he said he wasn’t a saint, did he really mean to tell her that he was a demon and that she should be wary of him? When he told her that he had done some bad things in his own time, did he really mean that he had killed more people than he could count? She dropped her head in her palms and closed her eyes, a part of her wanted to believe that Shin was a gentle man. That he was a good guy and would never attack anyone unless first attacked. But then the other part of her, the part that was logical enough to know that the death of the woman who had been in his bed with two other Asian looking men from a katana was not going to be a coincidence to the fact that he just happened to own a katana and practiced with it so often. There really could only be so many coincidences. She silently started to feel like calling her mom. Just in case this man decided that he wanted her dead, she needed to talk to her mom one last time at least. She was still pondering on whether she should step out for a moment and call her mother or just wait for Shin to arrive, talk to him and then call her mother later. Before she could make up her mind, he walked into the room, looking like he was ready to take on the whole world or something.
“Hi...” he said with a small smile.”
“Hi” she answered back in the same manner.
“I'm sorry about last night...” he said again and she nodded. Now that she looked at him, she could see that he wasn’t the sort that she had feared that he was. His eyes were soft and his lips looked ready to be kissed. For a moment, all she wanted to do was drag him back home and make him finish what they had started the night before.
“Well, how was your day been?” he asked her. She frowned and nodded slightly.
“It has been fine but for the news of three people murdered in the streets last night.” she said while looking into his eyes fixedly.
“Oh... that’s too bad. It is becoming more dangerous out there every day.” She was staring into his eyes, hoping that somehow he would see that she suspected him of the murders. He however didn’t seem to notice and he beckoned to Amanda instead and ordered his own cup of coffee. Amanda seemed really happy to serve him and she was back with his coffee in moment. As he picked up the coffee mug that had been placed in front of him, he exposed his wrist and Amie’s eyes caught a rather deep wound that looked fresh on the inner side of his wrist. Her eyes widened. Before that moment, all she had was speculations, but now, at that moment, she was looking at proof that he had been in a violent tussle recently. If one added the fact that three people who she thought he knew were dead, what she really had was a gruesome picture. She was sitting across from a murderer. A man who had taken other human’s lives! Her confusion and fear travelled from her mind to her hands and her hands reacted to that by shaking violently. Suddenly, she spilled the coffee she was trying to bring to her lips.
“Are you okay?” he asked as he started to help her dry off with paper towels. She shook her head and looked into his eyes.
“Yea... I guess...” and then before she could get the chance to think about it,
“What happened to your wrist?” she asked as she nodded at the bruised wrist. He looked at it and then at her. Then he smiled.
“Last night.... I was visiting some friends and this happened. It happens a lot.” He said with a smile. He even threw in a bout of nervous laughter for good measure. She continued to stare at him. Obviously, she did not believe him one bit.
“Common... it is funny... what’s up with you today?” he asked with a slight frown. She looked at him in that moment and decided that if she must die, she would die just once. She decided to confront him with the question directly
“Shin... did you kill those people?”
He didn’t look shocked by her question. Rather, he looked like he had been expecting it. He looked into her eyes and stared at her as if he was contemplating what to tell her and how it would be best to tell it to her. Before he could make up his mind, she added.
“Think about the response very well Shin... I am no police officer or private investigator but I can put two and two together. You left me abruptly last night and returned about three hours later, I don’t believe it’s a coincidence people died within that time frame too and you show up with a cut this morning. But please, tell me I'm wrong. Tell me this was just a mix up and you did not actually kill those people!” the panic in her voice was palpable and she was starting to shake. Her eyes were red and she looked like she would bring the whole building down with a really loud scream.
"Amie... calm yourself. There is an explanation for everything.” She shook her head and started to push her chair away from him.
“That woman was with you and I saw her that night. I saw the two of you together and now she is dead. Is that what is going to happen to me too? Am I going to just wind up dead? It does seem like people around you seem to get into trouble doesn’t it?” she was shouting now and the people in the shop were watching her. They were watching them. He remained in his seat, looking like he was going to pounce on her and stuff things in her mouth to keep her quiet.
She continued to talk in fast tones. Not seeming to notice that his eyes were roving around the room and seeming to notice things around her. He closed his eyes for a minute as if willing himself to be calm. But her voice continued to float to him, her complaints and her fear. Eventually, he looked up into her eyes and said to her in his harshest voice yet.
“Goddamn it Amie, shut up!” she was stunned by the way he yelled at her. For a few seconds, she was quiet. Then she opened her mouth to say something but instead her mouth hung open.
“There is no point in screaming that loud my friend!” Amie and Shin whirled around and looked in the direction of the voice.
“Long time no see my dear friend.” The man said. Most of his face was shrouded by a face cap but from Shin’s reaction, it was obvious that he knew who it was. They were both silent, looking at each other as if they were in some sort of a stare down with the difference being that the other man was not really looking because the face cap covered his face. Amie cleared her throat in hopes that it would bring them both to their senses as she could already feel the tension of a bull about to charge.
For the first time she was noticing the men who had joined them in the coffee shop while she was carried away with worrying about the dead people. She frowned at first, and was about to tell the intruding man that this was none of his business when Shin pushed her to the floor with a loud
“Get down Amie!” she hit the ground with a thud just as the first sound of gunshots
rung in the air. It was sudden and it was unexpected and unanticipated. The bullets started to fly and all of a sudden, she saw Shin bring out two guns from his pockets and start to shoot at their attackers. There were six men in all and they covered each other such that he could not turn away from any of them even for a minute without getting hit.
Crouched beneath the tables, Amie was shaking like a tree in a storm as she watched shell casings and bullets clatter to the floor like rain drops. The iron table that they had been at shielded them from the bullets for the moment but the rain of pullets on it was starting to dent it and she was starting to wonder how long it would hold against these men who were determined to kill them.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” she was screaming under the table where she was plastered to the floor. Away from the view of the men who had invaded Amanda's shop and were now shooting the place up.
“I knew I would get in trouble with this guy! I just didn’t know it would be this sort of trouble!” she exclaimed to herself quietly. “What am I ever going to do now?” she looked around the room for some sort of escape route but noticed that all exits were blocked by armed men.
Seeing that there was no way out of the place, she lay down and stayed the way Shin had pushed her. Shin didn’t seem to be seeing her at that moment as he was too engrossed in a gun battle with the men. The sound of bullets hitting different things all around her was scary. She waited mentally for one of them to hit him but minute after minute; she found that the fight was not going to end so fast.
Finally, she heard the clicking of empty guns. They were out of bullets. To some extent, this was a good thing for her, but then in other aspects and dimensions, it was not so much of a good news. The fact that there were no more bullets meant that they were going to have to fight within close range. She peeped around the table to see that two men out of the six men that had been in the room were down. One of them had been shot in the head and his eyes were open as he stared blankly into space. The other man was face down and she couldn’t really tell from where she was if he was dead or alive. She also couldn’t tell what part of his body had been shot.
Shin slid cautiously out from behind his table refuge. He approached the men with some caution just before he got to them. He slid a dagger out of his pocket before they could see it and the man that had been rushing at him was stabbed in the neck. He must have hit the carotid artery because blood started to splatter all over the room. The blood was shooting into the air and landing in whatever direction the bleeding man turned that side of his neck. From Amie’s angle, she was already soaked with the dying man's blood, and when he fell down about two minutes after he started to run around the room confused and scared of what was happening to him, she started to vomit all over him even as he shook in the last vibrations before he would be dead. She could not help it. A mixture of coffee and pasta that she had had for breakfast kept spurting out of her mouth and all over the place. In horror of what she was doing, she fell back away from him. The katana sword that the man was holding fell from his hand and Shin had grabbed it mid air. Her fear was palpable and she was whimpering but Shin almost couldn’t hear her. He seemed to have been transported to another part of the world, another pan of existence at that point.
Using one of the still standing tables as a propeller, Shin jumped through the air and landed right in the middle of two out of the remaining three men. He hit the first man with the butt of the katana he was holding. The man fell back a little, stunned and confused from the force of the katana. Then Shin turned his back on him and turning in a 180 degree turn, he faced the other man while instantly stooping to avoid the dagger that had been thrown at him by the man who was standing a little way away from him. The katana slashed through the nearby man's legs and with an almost inhuman cry of pain, he fell to the ground as his legs had been cut off from under him neat. Shin abandoned him for the minute and turned to the man who had thrown the dagger, and was now running towards him with his own sword drawn and ready to run through Shin. From where Amie now stood watching the events, she screamed.
“Shin!” he turned and leaned out of the way such that the other man's katana sword ran through the air and buried itself in the chair behind him instead. Shin brought his sword up into the air and with what seemed to be a war cry, he brought it down on the man just right between his neck and shoulder blade. The man was instantly on the ground, shaking in the last throes of death. Shin screamed
“Arrrgah” and turned on the man whose legs he had chopped off. The man, seeing that Shin was approaching to finish him off, started to laugh. He was giggling through the enormous pain that he was going through at that moment.
“You are still Viper; you will always be Viper!” the man was saying through his giggles. Shin looked at him, as he came close to him to finish him off, the giggling man smiled with blood spattered all over his face.
“I am what I am...” Shin said with a blank face.
“They will find you... “Shin moved closer to the man and looked into his eyes.
“Maybe they will. But it won't be a dog like you that will kill me.” With this, Shin put the sword through the man's chest and must have pierced through the heart because the man then fell backwards in a matter of seconds. Shin then walked over to where Amie was seated in a pool of her own vomit.
“We need to get out of here!” he said and for the first time, she noticed the sound of the sirens that cut through the silence. The police were near. Shin led her through a back door that led through the kitchen. On the way out of the place, they found Amanda on the floor, passed out and fainted on the floor. Sadie wondered at what point she had fainted. At the level of the gunshots or after they had started the dagger and Katana fight.
He took her through some dark alleys as they were both soaked with blood and would have been easily detected if they walked through the streets. For the first time she had moved into her apartment building, she walked through the backdoor into the house. He took her up the stairs and walked her to her door. All through the walk, he had been quiet and almost cold. He had held her hand loosely without any emotion. She had stolen glances at him from time to time but she could not see anything in his eyes. Just a cold blankness like the one that one would find if they looked down at a dry well in winter. Her lips trembled from the impact of the experience she had just had and her blood pressure must have risen because she was suddenly having this splitting headache.
“What now?” she asked herself more than once as they walked to the house and she had been unable to answer it. She knew that he definitely would not be staying nearby. He would need to get as far away from the place as he could. If the police arrested him, she would be sad. But she couldn’t even tell at that point which would be worse, having the police arrest him, or having those men get their hands on him. What was she to do now? How was she to hide him? And how was she to be safe anyway?
“Here... go in your house and lock the door. Clean up and stay out of sight for as long as you can...” he paused for a minute and looked at her coldly.
“You were right. If a woman stays with me, she might be in danger. I don’t want you to be in any more danger than what you have already experienced.” She started to shake her head. She wanted to tell him to take her with him but she didn’t want to sound clingy. This was not about being clingy, she was afraid that they might come back for her and then she might not have him to defend her. She was afraid that now that they knew the place she stayed, they might come back and kill her or torment her. She wanted to leave too but how far could she go really?
“Shin...” she started to say something. She wanted to tell him that she didn’t feel safe without him in that house. She wanted to tell him that she was sorry for talking to him so harshly. She wanted to tell him to take her with him, but she cut her short.
“Good bye Amie. You will not be seeing me again.” And he was gone. She stood at the door for what seemed like ten years but was really ten minutes, and when she finally closed th
e door behind her, she fell to the floor of her room and burst into tears.
Chapter 9
The days after Shins disappearance saw her cowering in her room and refusing to get out. On one hand, she was afraid that if she stepped out, she might be recognised by someone who had seen what happened and reported to the police, while on the other hand, she was afraid that the men who were hunting Shin had not really left town totally and that she would be at their mercy if they caught her and recognised her. She wanted to stay on a low key for as long as possible as Shin had instructed, and she even wondered how Amanda had not talked to the police yet. She figured that if Amanda talked to the police, she would be arrested and charged with conspiracy or any such thing that fit their description of what she had done. She had seen a whole lot of movies where the police had the situation all wrong and arrested the wrong people just because they had wrong information or they had been influenced by the people who were hunting the characters. One night, she had thought that she heard something downstairs and had been frozen in a corner of her room for as long as she thought whatever it was still there.
She would look in the peep hole over and over again, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man. She willed all her experiences of the last few days to be just some bad dream. She willed it to be some sort of hanky-panky on the part of her mind. Some sort of hallucination that would soon wear off. But the more she peeped into the hole every day, she discovered that she was not hallucinating at all, and that Shin and his godlike body and spirit like moves were gone for good. Her heart sank every morning when she thought about the things that she had lost.
That feeling of loss was back again.
The feeling she had finally gotten as she watched her father's body being lowered into the floor. The feeling she had seen in her mother's eyes. That feeling of loneliness and emptiness. She could feel it now even worse than ever. When she had buried her father, she had thought that somehow it was some sort of relief. Especially since she would not see him suffer so much anymore. He would not come home with bleeding wounds and broken bones anymore. Neither would he be coming home with injured organs and ruptured spleen. It seemed to her that death was the ultimate rest and after a while, she had stopped feeling abandoned and left alone. She had started to feel like now he would be okay forever.
Hidden: A Dark Mafia Romance (Forbidden Kiss Book 1) Page 8
